Category: blog

So I saw this on Cory Doctorow’s Tumblr right as I was getting ready for bed last night.

And all I could think of was a Marine drill sergeant training these robots … so this happened. It may help to hear it in Lee Ermey’s voice from Full Metal Jacket.

I DON’T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD/
THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS ARE REALLY OLD
GIMMIE SOME!
(gimmie some!)
FIRST LAW!
(first law!)
ROBOT MAY
(robot may)
NOT HARM!
(not harm)
A HUMAN BEING
(a human being)
LIKE ME OR YOU
(me or you)
OR THROUGH INACTION
(through inaction)
LET HARM THROUGH
(harm through!)

MY MAMA TOLD ME THAT SHE ONCE SAW/
A ROBOT FOLLOW THE SECOND LAW

NOW GIMMIE SOME
(gimmie some)
SECOND LAW
(second law)
UNLESS IT BREAKS
(unless it breaks)
THE FIRST LAW
(first law)

THE THIRD LAW SAYS TO PROTECT YOURSELF/
BUT FOLLOW THE FIRST/
AND THE SECOND AS WELL

GIMMIE SOME!
(gimmie some)
THIRD LAW
(third law)
PROTECT YOURSELF
(protect yourself)
WITHIN THE LAWS
(within the laws)

I LIVE IN A BICAMERAL STATE/
BUT THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS ARE REALLY GREAT!

&etc.

I kinda want to retreat into Fort Kickass and stay there all day, listening to Stabbing Westward and eating cookies.

The first draft of Ravenswood is with a couple of early readers who will give me the feedback I need to polish it up and send it to my editor. I haven’t decided it if will get released as its own thing (it’s just over 10000 words) or if I’ll keep it as part of the collection of short stories I originally intended for it to live.

Now I’m going back to finish the first draft of another short called Devil’s Gate, and then I’ll circle back around to finishing the puke draft of the short story that became a novella that ended up becoming a novel, which is currently called The Childhood I Lost but needs a better title.

I still don’t know if that thing holds together, and I think that part of the reason I haven’t finished it is being afraid of handing it to an early reader who may say, “this doesn’t hold together, dude.”

I’m late to the party, so most of you have probably watched all of Black Mirror, but Anne and I started series three last night and … wow. It’s intense. I highly recommend it, but probably don’t binge, because each episode deserves at least 24 hours in your brains to unpack itself.

Back in the Before Times, in the Long Long Ago, I’d save up links and stuff over a couple of days, and then post a link dump on my blog. With the advent of platforms that are specifically designed to do quick hits like links and pictures and whatever dumb thing just crossed my mind, it’s kind of pointless to do that today.

But I’m going to do that today, because the whole point of Daily December is to just post something every day, even if it’s a bunch of dumb links.

Let’s start with this really cool thing that @midnight is doing! A weekly Spotify playlist of recordings by the comedians that are on the show.

How cool does Hardwick look in that picture? The answer is all the cool.

I may have bought myself a glowing Enterprise schematic from ThinkGeek because I don’t need a reason.

I did the Arduino version of Hello, World last night.

Hello, World!

A video posted by Wil Wheaton (@itswilwheaton) on Dec 9, 2016 at 11:12pm PST

Maybe it’s my eyes getting older, but I struggled more than I expected to put the wires into the right places on the breadboard. I haven’t worked with electronic connections that small and precise in like thirty years, at least, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right. It turns out that I managed to get it right on the first try, so I guess I win a gold star?

My first impression of Arduino vs. Raspberry Pi is that the rPI (or RPI? I don’t know what the cool kids call it, but I know it’s something like that) is more my speed. I like the idea of connecting electronics, but the reality of writing code and getting software to do stuff is more satisfying and comes more easily to me. I had also forgotten how inscrutable C (the language, not the mathematical constant) is to me, and how much easier Python is for me to understand as a programming language. Maybe it’s because I struggled with C a lot when I was trying to learn it in my teens and twenties, while I’ve been learning Python as an adult with access to more resources to help my understanding, or maybe Python is just easier than C for someone whose brain is wired like mine is. Whatever the reason, my heart or my shoes, I’m going to have an easier time writing a Python script to annoy the Whos.

I’ll probably end up copying sketches for Arduino instead of trying to write my own, at least for the foreseeable future, and I’m okay with that. I think the fun and challenge of Arduino is in the actual use of the electronics, anyway, and not the programming.

This picture makes me so happy. I feel like the world is on fire, and I’ve been finding comfort in little things, like pictures from the RPG books I read when I was a kid and it seemed like the world would never be on fire.

I shipped all the coffee orders from the secret store yesterday. The other thing you can order in the secret store has like ten left, and I’m going to ship all of those things on Monday. If you don’t know what the secret store is, or how to get in, don’t feel bad; it’s a secret to everyone.

This is your yearly reminder that Christmas Lounge from SomaFM is the only Christmas music station you need.

I get these stats from Instagram, and they tell me that like 50,000 people on average are looking at the dumb videos I post there. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but it sure feels like a lot. I realized that something has changed in me, because instead of panicking about it, I feel like oh man I gotta make something amusing or stupid or stupidly amusing, because that’s a lot of people who I can entertain.

I got this picture of all the tires in the world from imgur, and used gimp to make it seamless, so if you wanted your desktop to be a bunch of tires for some reason, you can tile it.

Yeah I don’t know why, either, but there it is. At the very least, it can probably be used as a cool texture for some layers or whatever.